The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to both the publishing industry and readers at large. Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between November 1, 2015, and October 31, 2016 (see FAQ for exceptions), are automatically nominated for the 2016 Kirkus Prize, and the winners will be selected on November 3, 2016, by an esteemed panel composed of nationally respected writers and highly regarded booksellers, librarians and Kirkus critics.

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Novelist William Giraldi found writing his memoir The Hero's Body at once arduous and simple.

The book entwines his experiences as a teenage bodybuilder, the story of his ultra-macho working-class family and his father's untimely death in a motorcycle crash when he was in his 40s, the author in his 20s.

"I really started writing it when my father died 16 years ago," he says. "The writing was periodic. I struggled to put all of the material down ...

Most readers know Teju Cole as the photography critic for the New York Times. Others know him as the novelist who explores, through his narrative gestures, the various ways in which one comes to build an identity in an environment that makes prejudice and binaries rules of thumb. But to assign Cole a trade would be undermining his entire practice. A better term might be “cultural producer.” Born in Michigan and raised in Nigeria, Cole has crafted a multimedia ...

A forceful advocate for social change who had the ear of the one woman who mattered.

Interviewed by
Maya Payne Smart
on
December 8, 2016

Patricia Bell-Scott photographed by Anne Yarbourgh

InThe Firebrand and the First Lady, scholar Patricia Bell-Scott illuminates the unlikely friendship between two historic American women. Radical civil and women’s rights activist Pauli Murray and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt corresponded for years and swayed one another’s social justice aims and strategies. Their views never converged, but Bell-Scott makes a compelling case that they grew with and toward each other.

“I started out being interested primarily in doing a biography, but then the friendship just drew me in ...

Even as a teenager, Jean Cocteau tried to calm worries about his future even as he would fly off in new and illogical directions stemming from his interests of the moment. “Never fear,” he wrote to his worried mother, “there is beneath my seeming frivolity something great and profound, which I have wanted to mask.” After that letter, he went on to create a career of incredible breadth, becoming at one point or another, a novelist, director, artist ...

Numerous artists, journalists, and novelists have chronicled the Allies’ attempt to denazify and democratize Germany after the country’s surrender in 1945. Rather than let the vast body of literature about that period intimidate her, author Lara Feigel used it to her advantage. Her new book, The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich, is both a cultural history of the Allied occupation of Germany and a group biography of the artists and writers, like Martha Gellhorn, Lee ...

What does a haunted house in California have to do with gun control? This question animates Pamela Haag’s newest book, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, a history of the gun business in the late 19th century focused on the Winchester family. Haag shows this history as two interrelated stories, represented respectively in the lives of Oliver Winchester, the founder of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and his daughter-in-law Sarah Winchester. Oliver’s story centers on ...

Each year, one of my most difficult tasks is the selection of the 100 books for the Best Nonfiction issue. As tough as the process is, however, it’s not realistic to believe that all 100 books—or even a small percentage of them—are going to be studied 10, 20, or 100 years from now.

But making predictions is always fun, and this year has produced a few books that have the makings of modern classics, to be enjoyed, discussed, dissected, and ...

Napoli first came across Joan Kroc as an arts reporter for KCRW while covering a movement in Santa Monica to save “Chain Reaction,” Paul Conrad’s 26-foot tall anti-war sculpture of a mushroom cloud ...

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